Words - the continuing story

So this is what I learned about promoting language development at the "zero to one word" stage - it's not necessarily about knowing the words. In fact, the Small Boy had previously been using a number of words and phrases before he was two, and then stopped for months. Things like "onna bike", "back door", "juice", "breakfast". And he responded appropriately to a lot more than he said ("this way". "Follow Daddy". "Time for jamas". "Brush teeth") and I'm sure understood the meaning of a lot of words that he didn't need to particularly respond to.


And yet, he wasn't using these words. Why not?


One thing I now believe about this stage of language development is that the crucial hurdle he needed to get over was confidence. His life was filled with people - mum, dad, big sisters - using all these complicated phrases at him. And for "complicated", read "two or three words". We thought we were making things nice and simple for him. Not nearly simple enough.


The message from us to him for this next phase, simply stated was this - you CAN communicate with just one word at a time, if that's all you've got. You're allowed to. Really. Look. Observe...


Daniel.


Daniel?


Juice?


Juice!


Hmmm. Cup.


There! Cup.


Pour. Juice!


Hmmmm. Lid.


Lid?


There! Lid!


Juice. Tasty.


Book?


Book.


Sit.


Book.


(read read read read)


The End.


Again?


(read read read read)


The End.


Again?


(How many times can you read the same picture book over again before you go insane? Well, it turns out I can do at least 'a couple of dozen a day for six weeks or so.' More than that, I wouldn't like to promise. Let me say, I am now really solidly grounded on what the wheels on the bus do. Apparently, they go round and round. ALL day long)


One of my favourite things from this stage was working out all the non-verbal ways he had of communicating things with us. There was the old "bring the juice bottle" trick. That was fairly straightforward. Less obvious - going to the garden to get two sticks (one for him, one for me). That meant "lets go for a walk" (and trail our sticks on the ground). And pretty soon, the words started to come back. More. Juice. Bear. Train. No.


And of course, the big favourite. AGAIN.


Again?

Big Sister - Junior therapist

I definitely haven't written enough here about the awesomeness that is the Taller Girl. The Taller Girl is four years older than her little brother, and, at seven, is old enough to understand that there's something 'different' about him.


She is incredibly protective of him - sometimes a little too protective in fact. At playgrounds, she will intercept small kids bounding up to him with "what's your name" or complicated instructions on correct playing of whatever game is currently taking over the playground, and act as his barricade. "He doesn't understand you. He doesn't talk." No longer quite true, as it happens (although he's still more than usually quiet, particularly outside the family) and I have to encourage her to have a more optimistic view of his abilities. Under the best of circumstances, a seven year old is always going to take a rather superior view of the abilities of a three year old brother!


But the most valuable thing she does is play, play, play with him. The Smaller Girl also plays with him, but generally by playing down to his level. The Smaller Girl is a big bouncer, squealer and runner-about - these things are certainly very attractive to His Shortness, and they can happily bounce squeal and run about together all afternoon (or until accidental grevious bodily harm is inflicted one upon the other, and we experience a different type of squealing). When the Taller Girl plays, she extends him.


Last week she was home for two days with conjunctivitis - enough to exclude her from school, but not exactly sick. So they drew. Her drawing is, of course, far advanced of his, but not so far advanced that he can't appreciate and aspire to the level she's at. He drew trees - she drew trees too, but with branches. An interesting new development. Now he can do branches too - fat boxy affairs, scaffolded (of course) with dots. She drew fishes. So he wanted to draw some fishes too (which sadly proved a little hard, so we ended up with 'mumma draw a green fish!'. But the attempt was there). Currently he's decided that eggs are what he's drawing this week. I can understand the attraction - they're really easy to get right.


And while all that was going on, I did the dishes. That's valuable too.

In Praise of Dots

Occupational Therapists are great. This is what we learnt from our OT a couple of visits ago:


One dot on the page. Dot to the right. Dot below. Dot to the left. What does that make?


Across...down...across...up...a square!


Another dot on the page. Dot below. Another dot below. Down...across...up...a triangle!


The Small Boy has been having a lot of trouble with the concept of drawing. He likes in in theory. But then he gets that pen on the paper, and his perfectionist nature rears its ugly head, roadblocking him. He draws a line and it's not right!. Tears, and a piece of paper is flung away. Next paper. Another line. Not Right!


Dots are calming, dots are soothing, dots help him to stay in control. The line that he draws from one dot to another may be exceedingly wobbly - it may even not hit the target dot. But that's okay. As long as he has another dot to aim for, he can handle this.


After we learnt the square/triangle/diamond exercise, I started extending him. First we did square inside a square. Then circles (lots of dots). Then for a couple of weeks we were doing aeroplanes. I'd do the dots, we'd join them up together (hand over hand). With the more complicated figures, he seemed to have not quite so much confidence to do it all himself (and in any case Mummy Help is always appreciated).


Then a few days ago he was in the kitchen by himself for about half an hour beavering away, and when I finally came in I discovered he'd created this:

http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif


They're trees. Big rectangle with dots for the trunk, more dots for leaves on top, and "two eyes a nose and a mouth". I believe they're probably based on the Mean Stuff-Stealing trees from Pyjama Sam


Oh, and he used the kid scissors to cut them out entirely by himself too.


Did I mention I like dots?

Little Scientist

Ever get the feeling your kid is experimenting on you?

Back around the "just gone three" mark, when the Small Boy's words could still be counted on your fingers, I was continually on the lookout for signs that he understood one particular word or another. The aim was identifying individual words - there were a number of long(-ish) word strings that he clearly understood the meanings of, but extracting the specific units of meaning within those sentences was something that may or may not have been happening. So I would watch closely for signs of understanding, and set up word games to try to test his knowledge.

One of these I remember quite clearly. It was called "Where's Bear" and was played with a cast of a) Bear and b) Wombat

"Where's Bear"

{holds up Bear}

"Look! Bear! There's Bear! Where's Wombat?"

{holds up Wombat}

"Yes! Wombat!"

... and so on and so on. That was pretty much the whole game, which could go on for about fifteen minutes (which is actually rather a long time to get excited about two stuffed toys being raised ten cm multiple times). The above was the ideal - in fact the game frequently went more like this:

"Where's Bear"

{holds up Wombat}

"No! That's not Bear. That's Wombat! Where's Wombat?"

{holds up Bear}

"No! That's not Wombat."

So, totally useless from the point of view of testing his knowledge - except that I knew for a fact that he most certainly did know which of them was Bear and which was Wombat. This was Bear the Beloved, Companion of the Bedtime ... not know Bear? Impossible! And besides, he had that look in his eyes. I was busy testing him, but he'd turned it right around and was testing me. Hmmm... she said 'Bear' - what will she do if I hold up the wombat instead? Ooh! That was interesting! Lets do it again!

Of course, this has implications for IQ and language development testing, where they do just that - present him with a variety of options and ask him to identify which is which. Since he had absolutely zero motivation to identify objects correctly just because someone has asked him to, he won't. It's much more fun to identify them incorrectly, and see what your tester's reaction is.

Now that I have a Talking Small Boy, I've pretty much given up on the language testing thing. Current scheme is terribly scientific - does it "look like" he understands? If so, keep on going.

It's not the testing that matters, it's the skills. As long as the skills are developing, I can live with the uncertainty of not really knowing excatly how fast.